Example of a Niche

I think it was Joel Spolsky, or maybe it was Eric Sink, gave the example of a niche of a web site for professional programmers. Maybe this was an invented example, or maybe not. An acquaintance who is a pro photographer in US was enthusing about the power of liveBooks http://www.livebooks.com/
compared to the frustrations of trying to maintain his own web site (web site maintenance not being a core activity for a professional photographer ... Photoshop etc yes, but Dreamweaver no :-)
It makes perfect sense, and just shows that with a bit of imagination high value customers will stump up the sheckels if you deliver

Oh Envy!

Shows it can be done. Might wake up the Irish Government about the lost opportunities
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/electric/20080326/ttc-irish-brothers-make-millions-on-onli-70a53e7.html

The Winner Takes All...

Or Maybe Not

The winner takes all hypopthesis is that if enough people have a certain word processor, other people will be forced to buy it too if they want to be able to read the documents, thus putting other word-processor companies out of business. Of course it doesnt always quit work that way -- the following extract is a good explanation

Reconsideration of the winner-take-all hypothesis: complex....

Elixir for tired old code

I'm trying to coax some life back into an old VB6 system, and have been digging around for inspiration and came across the following delightful article
Model View Presenter in Visual Basic 6. Part 1
Very much worth a look if you want to program the New Way using an old ad-hoc system
Hats off to the author!

microfinance

Its an area I dont know enough about, but here is a link to a local
example
http://www.first-step.ie/
and a gateway site which I havent got through myself but maybe a starting point
http://www.microfinancegateway.org/

psuedoScience

I see the Kondratieff wave is back in fashion again -- it seemed a great idea when I read about it first, but now the absurdity of a supposed systematic explanation of economic data which span time periods longer than a human life strikes me very strongly.
We all love trends and neat explanations, see the likes of
http://www.moneyweek.com/file/3075/housing-boom.html
and
Boom Bust: House Prices, Banking and the Depression of 2010, by Fred Harrison
but the trouble with all these analyses is that the world isn't that neat. We should have had a bigger correction in 2001/2002, if Alan Greenspan hadn't decided to inflate his way out of trouble in 2002. That might have sorted everything out temporarily at least, and would have thrown all these neat 18 year and 75 year cycle theories out of whack

The Second Bounce

I've just finished reading
The Second Bounce Of The Ball: Turning Risk into Opportunity by Ronald Cohen
Quite an interesting book, he sounds like one of the good guys, and he mentions some of the things that I mull over in my intellectual moments, such as micro-finance and enterprise versus learned dependency